This invention is applicable in general to the collection of articles from a production line moving at high speed in the order of their production. The invention will be described herein with particular reference to collecting elongated, light weight cigarette filter rods in the order of their production for test purposes. The invention should find application in instances where articles having a surface which can be attached to by a strip of material such as adhesive tape are being conveyed.
To properly determine how filter rod properties and quality change as the operating conditions change on production equipment (commonly called plugmaker), the rods must be individually analyzed in the order in which they were produced. A problem has existed, however, in that the rods are produced and conveyed away from the production equipment at such high speeds that it is very difficult to collect samples in consecutive order for testing and/or analysis. In the past, when one wanted to collect rods for analyses, a number of people were assembled and each person used boards which had masking tape attached to them with the "sticky" side turned down. The boards would be pressed down on the rods as exit the plugmaker. This technique was unsatisfactory; some rods were missed, some were damaged or crushed during the collecting step, some were damaged when they were pulled from the masking tape for testing and it was very labor intensive. Therefore, there exists a need for apparatus for taking samples from a high speed conveyor in the order in which they were made for subsequent testing and/or analysis.